The death of Jack Kevorkian by natural causes has a certain irony, but it is not surprising. His driving motive was alwaysobsession with death. Indeed, as he described in his book PrescriptionMedicide, Kevorkian’s overriding purpose in his assisted-suicide campaignwas pure quackery, e.g., to obtain a societal license to engage in what hecalled “obitiatry,” that is, the right to experiment on the brains andspinal cords of “living human bodies” being euthanized to “pinpoint theexact onset of extinction of an unknown cognitive mechanism that energizeslife.”

So, now that he is gone, what is Kevorkian’s legacy? He assisted thesuicides of 130 or so people and lethally injected at least two by his ownadmission (his first and his last); as a consequence of the latter, he servednearly ten years in prison for murder. But I think his more important placein contemporary history was as a dark mirror that reflected how powerful theavoidance of suffering has become as a driving force in society, and indeed,how that excuse seems to justify nearly any excess.

Thus, while the media continually described him as the “retired” doctor whohelped “the terminally ill” to commit suicide, at least 70 percent of hisassisted suicides were not dying, and five weren’t ill at all according totheir autopsies. It. Didn’t. Matter. Kevorkian advocated tying assistedsuicide in with organ harvesting, and even stripped the kidneys from thebody of one of his cases, offering them at a press conference, “first come,first served.” It. Didn’t. Matter. And as noted above, he wanted to engagein ghoulish experiments. It. Didn’t. Matter. He was fawned over by themedia (Time invited him as an honored guest to its 75th anniversary gala, and he had carte blanche on 60 Minutes), enjoyed high opinion polls,and after his release from prison was transformed by sheer revisionism intoan eccentric Muppet. He was even played by Al Pacino in an HBO hagiography.

Kevorkian was disturbingly prophetic. He called for thecreation of euthanasia clinics where people could go who didn’t want tolive anymore. They now exist in Switzerland and were recentlyoverwhelmingly supported by the voters of Zurich in an initiative intendedto stop what is called “suicide tourism.” Belgian doctors have nowexplicitly tied euthanasia and organ harvesting. In the U.S., mobile suicideclinics run by Final Exit Network zealots continue unabated despite twoprosecutions, as voters in two states legalized Kevorkianism as a medicaltreatment.

Time will tell whether Kevorkian will be remembered merely as a kook whocaptured the temporary zeitgeist of the times, or whether he was a harbingerof a society that, in the words of Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne,“believes in nothing [and] can offer no argument even against death.“

— Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow in the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, and a legal consultant for the Patient’s Rights Council.